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Pulp Invasion

L. Ron Hubbard’s legacy is, if nothing else, constantly surprising in its manifestations. On a recent morning, barely conscious, holding a cup of coffee, and racing through Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station to catch a train back to New York, I suddenly realized that everyone around me was captivated. And what were they looking at? Fifteen-foot-tall illustrations of blondes, pirates, tigers, and Chinese men holding daggers, suspended on banners from the ceiling, laid out on posters on the floor, hanging in frames on the walls, mounted in placards on the platforms. They were brightly colored, and beneath each was written.…

“Experience the awesome adventures of The Stories from the Golden Age”: “Branded Outlaw,” “If I Were You,” “Under the Black Ensign.” I knew that Hubbard had had a career as a pulp-fiction scribbler in the thirties, contributing stories to twenty-cent monthlies (before he embraced a higher calling), but I was astonished by the size of the ad campaign. When I got the chance, I did a little cyber-sleuthing. The term “golden age” is associated, of course, with Hubbard’s career as a science-fiction writer from the nineteen-thirties to the early fifties. But it’s also used in the name of a program established, in 2005, by the Church of Scientology’s Religious Technology Center, “The Golden Age of Knowledge,” which uses Hubbard’s religious books to guide believers in their journey along the “Bridge.” And then there’s this campaign, devoted solely to the “golden age of pulp fiction.” It’s the doing of one Galaxy Press, which has its headquarters on Hollywood Blvd., and which, as far as I could gather from its Web site, offers only one product. I sent Galaxy an e-mail of inquiry, and in response they sent a representative to meet me. She was a friendly woman in a tailored skirt suit, and she had with her a luggage dolly with a large white box. Its contents:

A black leather portfolio with catalogues, press mentions, and CDs

A coffee-table book, “Master Storyteller: An illustrated tour of the fiction of L. Ron Hubbard”

5 books from the series

5 audiobooks from the series

A cardboard tube containing 3 posters

It seems like quite an expense for an independent publisher, no? But it’s not a bad bet: the project will eventually encompass eighty volumes of Hubbard’s fiction. He wrote prolifically, under a variety of names (Winchester Remington Colt, Kurt von Rachen, and Lt. Jonathan Daly, to name a few), and everything he wrote sold: today (according to Galaxy), there are over two hundred and thirty million copies of his works in print. (See Dana Goodyear’s post on his religious books.)

So do the stories in this series live up to their press? Yes, for what they are—pulpy, immediate, ridiculous, enjoyable. My favorite so far is “The Great Secret”:

Dreaming, not realizing how acutely his body suffered and how slender became his strength, he struggled on until dawn, through the dry washes, over the shaled ridges, though the gritty valleys. He to whom the most beautiful women and the most exquisite liquors of the Universe would be a commonplace could not be worried now about mere thirst and exhaustion.